Rob Ford: The scandal that was

It’s been almost a week since Gawker reported the existence of a video of Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. Here’s what went down in the interim:

The Gawker Crackstarter went all the way up to about $160,000 before they admitted they’d lost contact with the guy who had the video. Yes, I too am torn up that $200,000 of crowd-sourced money won’t go to a drug dealer. Crushed.

Mark Towhey, Ford’s chief of staff and one of his biggest cheerleaders, got shitcanned.

Rob Ford finally addressed the reports head-on, saying that “[he does] not smoke crack cocaine, nor [is he] an addict of crack cocaine.” Not gonna lie, I really wish that wasn’t something the mayor of our city didn’t have to clarify to the entire world.

Toronto has now largely become known as the city with the crack mayor. Seriously, even my mother is calling us that now. I mean, she’s a bitch. but still . . .

Which is to say, it’s been kind of a shit week for Toronto.

By now, you’ve either read the Maclean’s piece by Ivor Tossell wherein he outright calls for Ford to step down before he screws this up any more than he already has. I cannot cosign on this enough. At this point, Ford is in over his head and no one is going to tell him that he’s fucked five ways to Thanksgiving. Not only that, but like it or not, he is the primary representation of our city. And right now, a lot of people believe the representative from Toronto smokes crack. At this point, you might as well just tourniquet the limb and hack it off to salvage the rest of the body.